I have put my security education on the backburner for the last 2 years as I concentrated on learning how web servers work and how to use them. During that time I compiled tons of notes on how to use Apaches htaccess.

This is cool, you are basically categorizing all those files that end in those extensions so that they fall under the jurisdiction of the -ExecCGI command, which also means -FollowSymLinks (and the opposite is also true, +ExecCGI also turns on +FollowSymLinks)